Low Fat Macaroni and Cheese

This is a Weight Watchers Recipe but is delicious! 4 servings, 4 POINTS each for anyone who needs it.

• 1 can lower-fat cheddar cheese soup (I used regular)
• 3/4 can low fat milk
• 1/2 can water
• Between 1-1/2 to 1-3/4 cup of elbow shaped uncooked noodles

Mix soup, water and milk on high until boiling in a 3.5 to 4 quart pot. Once boiling, stir in pasta and cook over low heat until noodles are soft (about 15 minutes). STIR OFTEN or the noodles will burn on the bottom of the pan.

This is also a tried and true tested recipe for my young kids, ages 1.5 and 3.5, and they love it. They call it Mommy's Mac n cheese.

50 Reasons You Might Be a Hardcore Graphic Designer

For those who love Graphic Design work, like me... you will understand and appreciate this list way more than others:

1. You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
2. You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
3. You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard
5. You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.
6. You consider meals interruptions.
7. You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.
8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.
9. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.
11. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.
12. When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.
13. When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
14. You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
15. You’ve actually paid $ for a font.
16. You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best.
    (Everyone thinks they are a designer)
17. The amount of words you’ve written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you’ve read in novels.
18. You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.
19. You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
20. You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (And not affectionately)
21. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
22. You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
23. You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
24. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.
25. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.
26. You’ve had a client that thought they knew more about design than you.
27. Your clients pay you for your professional expertise and skill, yet you’ve run into one of ‘those’ clients, that refuses totake the advice from the very person he/she is paying for advice (You).
28. You’ve had a client that insisted on using the font “Papyrus,” and you had to hold in your barf as you prepped it [the design] for printing.
29. You’ve requested a vector logo from a client, and instead, they email you a 72 dpi image they grabbed from a website.
30. You’ve used typography as a texture.
31. You don’t have a favorite font because you love “Typography.” Not Fonts. Choosing a favorite font would be like choosing a favorite child, it’s just wrong. 
32. You collect as many free stuffs from the interwebs as you can on your hard drive, hoping that one day, that cool project will come along that you can actually use some cool shit on.
33. You’d rather have a free font than a free gallon of gas.
34. It’s hard to talk about frustrations at your job with a group of friends because they have no idea what “Vector” or “DPI” is, just to name a couple.
35. You’ve had a client ask you to “Make the logo bigger.”
36. You’ve had a client that insists on “filling up the space.”
37. You’ve learned to over-price web design projects because most clients are more picky about their websites than a high school girl picking out a prom dress.
38. You feel like you’re “On Call” half of the time because clients procrastinate so much.
39. You know keyboard shortcuts that require 4 fingers.
40. You’ve lost hours of work because an application crashed, and you had to start over from scratch because you were in the “zone” and forgot to save. Basically, you were having so much fun being creative that saving was the last thing on your mind at the time. 
41. You’ve “Live-Traced” something.
42. You spend more hours per week looking at CSS showcase sites than you do at the gym.
43. The only thing that would make you happier than the demise of IE6 is world peace.
44. You’ve done everything but give up a body part to talk a client out of a “Flash Intro.” Yeah. I said it. Flash Intro. Sad, so so sad. (Goes along with #2)
45. You have enough fonts on your hard drive to last you for: 1 font per day for about a decade, give or take a year or two.
46. You know, explicitly, what a “Flourish” is.
47. You worry about negative space as much as the content area.
48. You get phone calls from friends and family members on a regular, sometimes annoyingly frequent basis, wanting your services for free or extremely cheap. (& the “portfolio” line makes you want to throw something across the room)
49. You’ve had a client that wants a website they can “update” on their own, but doesn’t know shit about websites.
50. You’re never more than 99% happy with your final product because you believe that EVERYTHING can be improved upon. (ESPECIALLY WITH THOSE TIGHT-DEADLINE PROJECTS)

Craft Area

I am like most crafty people where I have many different styles and types of projects occurring at the same time. Because of this, I have a variety of specialties I work on including jewelry, scrapbooking, stamping, and more.

Using the Closetmaid storage from Target, I am able to have a craft area all to my own. This includes organizing the items into many different "bins". I designed this prior to the bins coming to market but I actually like that I have cubby holes for everything and then can hide the other items in the drawers under.

For the table tops, I went to IKEA for the "make your own desk" section. Then I screwed the tops to the cabinets underneath.

Then because it's a fun area, I used decor to bring fun and out came Paddington Bear and other odd's and ends. :)

Family Tree

I once saw a family tree design, I think from redenvelope.com, and thought the price was a little insane, especially since my side of the family and also my husband's side of the family were both in the process of expanding with grandchildren.

I found a leaf design on the internet, and started from there. Using a large 11x17" piece of paper, the Trunk of the Tree was created, then replicated for the other side.

Using construction paper, I took the leaf and printed it on Red Paper, Orange Paper and Yellow Paper. Next, I cut out the leaf I needed, while keeping the others I wasn't using still on the sheet. Flipping the leaf over, I wrote the person's name on it and their birth date. For the adults (my siblings and my parents, for example), I only put their month and date. But for the grandkids, I put their month, date, and year.

On my side of the family, my parents and my siblings are in Red. The spouses of my siblings in Orange. And any of our kids are in yellow leaves. For my husband's side of the family, I followed the same plan except my leaf is orange on his side and he is a red leaf because I'm married into his family.

I stored the extra pages in the back behind everything before I hung it. That way if there are grandkids still born, I still have the leaves easily accessible.

Travel Memories

Ever travel to a foreign country and you want something to be documented? I started with shot glasses, but as I grew older I realized this was not the best way to showcase my memories. Then I found a patch on one of my trips and the idea skyrocketed from there.

On one trip, I went hunting for a patch and found a great store that had everything! I was able to stock up on the patches I was missing.

Then came the thought, "Now what do I do with them?" -- frame them!

1st Year Footprints

I wanted to remember my children's footprints for their first year and debated how to do it. Someone gave me as a gift the Pottery Barn 1st Year photo frame and with that came an ink pad and some paper. Taking that concept, I started putting on the footprints.

My husband took a photo of my daughter's feet in my hands and the project took off from there. The middle image is the footprint of my daughter at 1-week. then from there I knew I could get 4 more sets of footprints onto the paper so we did 3-months, 6-months, 9-months, and 12-months.

Using a 10" x 20" frame, and they fit perfectly together. Michael's craft store sells ink pads that are child friendly, and baby wipes are easy to take off the ink once it's done.